Researchers unveil HORNET, a faster version of the anonymous Tor network

A team of researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and University College London have created a new anonymizing network that offers the privacy of the Tor network (or better) without the painfully slow speed.

Their network, known as HORNET (High-Speed Onion Routing at the NETwork layer), was detailed in a paper published this week. In it, the team claims their method can move anonymized traffic at up to 93 gigabits per second and can be scaled to support a large number of users with little overhead.

As The Daily Dot explains, the Tor network on average hosts more than two million users each day but it’s not without fault. Its primary hindrance is of course speed – or lack of it – due to the fact that performance depends on the number of computers that help to run the network.

In layman’s terms, the HORNET network avoids slowing to a crawl due to the way it handles information about where data is going. Removing this overhead is also said to limit how susceptible the network would be to outside attacks designed to identify network users.

While promising, one probably shouldn’t get too excited about it just yet as HORNET has not been peer-reviewed. Again, as the publication correctly points out, the network can’t be considered fully formed until others outside of the research team get a chance to put it through the paces.